“Memorial Day is meant to remind folks of the sacrifice borne by those who fell in battle in defense of the country, as well as their families. But once you lose someone in combat, Memorial Day bleeds across the rest of the calendar. Chevy’s name is written across the steel bracelet I wear on my wrist, and it’s as indelible as any memory of him that I have. It would be unconscionable to keep his memory constrained to one day a year, and the same goes for the other men we lost.”

The death toll in Joplin, Missouri, has now topped 118, making Sunday’s catastrophe the single deadliest tornado recorded in the United States since record keeping began 60 years ago.

AP Photographer Charlie Riedel took a trip in a helicopter to capture images of Joplin’s devastated landscape from above.

The American Red Cross has set up a number of shelters in the area and is taking donations. Those interested in contributing can either text REDCROSS to 90999 (for a $10 donation) or visit the Red Cross website

“I love you more than the taste of your mouth, more that your look, more than your hands, more than your whole body, more and more and more and more than all my love for you will ever be able love and I sign Picasso.”

She became the catalyst for some of his most exceptional work, from groundbreaking paintings to an inspired return to sculpture in the 1930s, according her an almost mythic stature and earning her immortality as an art historical subject. Yet her true identity remained a secret from even Picasso’s closest friends. Even after Marie-Thérèse bore their daughter Maya in 1935, Picasso would continue to divide his time between his professional life as the most famous artist in the world, and his secret family life, spending Thursdays and weekends with her and Maya and amassing a trove of love letters and snapshots exchanged while they were apart.

While it is inspiring to see that love can inspire such great art, at the same time it is heartbreaking to find that this love did not last.

Two months after their daughter Maya was born, Picasso attended a movie opening and met his new mistress – photographer Dora Maar.

Unable to go on living now that Picasso was dead, Marie-Thérèse took her own life in 1977, 50 years after they met. (Vanity Fair)

“Being rich does not automatically lead to a rich life. There is a difference between money and success. To be totally engaged with all my functions, all my faculties, all my capacities in life — to me that would be success. ” (Harvard Business Review)

What about the rat race in the first place? Is it worthwhile? Or are you just buying into someone else’s definition of success? Only you can decide that, and you’ll have to decide it over and over and over. But if you think it’s a rat race, before you drop out, take a deep breath. Maybe you picked the wrong job. Try again. And then try again. Try until you find something that stirs your passion, a job that matters to you and matters to others. It is the ultimate luxury to combine passion and contribution. It’s also a very clear path to happiness.

Last year I saw Mark Rylance give a virtuoso performance as Valere in La Bête when he came on stage and launched into a 30 minute mesmerizing monologue.

In Jez Butterworth’s Jerusalem he manages to achieve the same thing without speaking a word. As Johnny “Rooster” Byron he emerges from the trailer where he lives after an all-night rave and with mesmerising physicality washes his face by doing a handstand and dipping his head into a trough of water. He then makes himself a liquid breakfast of eggs, alcohol, milk and drugs while gyrating to music.

As you can tell from his name, Johnny represents an Englishman – but one far removed from the usual image portrayed on American TV in either regency breeches or the landed gentry. Instead Rooster can only be a muscledound tatttoed drug-dealing bling-wearing swearing gentleman of the 21st century who fights for his own mythical vision of England against all forms of modern authority.

The play is set on St George’s Day, which happened to be the day when I went to see it. After many standing ovations, Rylance gave a great speech about how the English don’t celebrate St George’s Day because the flag and nationalism came to be associated with racism and fascism – but true Englishness does not mean any of these things.

Like Rooster, he is fighting for his own vision of England’s green and pleasant land.

Although the High Line was opened as a park in 2009 it has taken me two years to get there.

The High Line was built in the 1930s, as part of a massive public-private infrastructure project called the West Side Improvement. It lifted freight traffic 30 feet in the air, removing dangerous trains from the streets of Manhattan’s largest industrial district. No trains have run on the High Line since 1980. Friends of the High Line, a community-based non-profit group, formed in 1999 when the historic structure was under threat of demolition.

“there must be a deep relationship with the word “chord”: the resonant vibration that can stir memory, produce music, evoke love, bring tears, move crowds to pity and mobs to passion. We may not be, as we used to boast, the only animals capable of speech. But we are the only ones who can deploy vocal communication for sheer pleasure and recreation, combining it with our two other boasts of reason and humor to produce higher syntheses. To lose this ability is to be deprived of an entire range of faculty: it is assuredly to die more than a little.”

– I usually don’t write about finance on my blog but this story can’t fail to grab you : the JP Morgan bankers leaping out of Black Hawk helicopters while hunting for Afghan gold (Fortune) ;

Where the pursuit of opulence is predicated on having more, bigger, cheaper, eudaimonia is a more nuanced, complex conception of a good life: it’s about whether or not the pursuit of mere stuff actually translates into living, working, and playing meaningfully better in human terms.

What you love can differ, but the love, once it comes, that feeling of waking up with a kind of eagerness, a crazy momentum that pushes you into your day, an excitement you realize you don’t ever want to go way… that’s important.

If you don’t have that feeling, maybe you’re lucky. You can lead a more sane life. But if you do – I say congratulations. You have what it takes to begin.

I am lucky enough to love what I do but I also love my weekends. Have a good one.